Episode 7 – Elliot Jaffe [Writer]

Hi all. Welcome to episode 7. For this episode we feature Elliot, a young University graduate who is finding his place in the world after graduating from his Bachelor of International Business Degree from the University of Auckland. On a chance conversation with a random rider in the car through lockdown, I met Chelsea. We got to talking and she mentioned her partner was working with blogs.  Through this connection, I connected with Elliot and this is how we ended up talking about his experiences in this new digital age and how he navigated to this point in his life.

After completing his degree in 2016, Elliot continued on and also completed his Masters with honours. The world was at his feet and it would seem that he had it all planned out. As many young people do in this age, he decided to take a bit of a break to travel. After a stint in England playing a bit of cricket and a detour to Japan, he decided to settle in and plan out what the next move to be.

The plan was not to necessarily move to Australia, but Chelsea managed to get a job at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and their destiny was set in motion. Elliot managed to get a couple of Sales roles and it would seem that this was to be his future path. Deep down however he knew that this was not the path he really wanted. In fact, he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with himself.

Like many others, when the country went into lockdown, he suddenly found that the work dried up and was suddenly out of work. He then made a decision that the sales area was not something he wanted to go into and accidentally fell into writing. 

He decided to develop a blog to document the stories of small business owners living through the pandemic. He wasn’t sure how to go about it in the beginning. He just did his research and made a start. He learnt how to build a website, utilise Zoom and then also taught himself how to touch type to transcribe the interviews he does.

He also didn’t have much of a network, but he just went to work contacting small business owners randomly to see if they wanted to get involved in his project. Some said no, but most were open to a conversation and he went on from there. His Sales experience started to kick in and he just went to work connecting, chatting and then interviewing. Check out his work with our very own Lisa Listama of the Live Work Digital fame!

Small Business World Blog

His story is one of positivity. His blog continues to grow  with the stories of hope and determination from business owners doing it tough. The message is clear,  local small businesses are struggling but they continue to fight and remain hopeful for the future.

He made a decision to follow another path and in the middle of it he found his passion. We love the fact that he is able to connect with random business owners who want to share their journeys.

What is clear is that no matter what stage of life or career you are at, the opportunity is there for anyone to be able to change course. Elliot is an amazing example for this generation of new leaders connecting and building relationships through this digital age we live in. There is still some uncertainty for the immediate future, but what is clear is that we can all find despair in these tough times, but we can also find hope and optimism as well.

We wish him well for his journey ahead.

From us, until next time….Auf Widersehen [Live, Work, Digital]

Episode 4 – Rory Callaghan [Integrated Health Professional]

In this week’s instalment of our Live Work Digital Podcast we have Rory Callaghan. Currently he resides in Bali,  living what some may call, the  Dream Digital Lifestyle. He is a qualified Physiotherapist and also has a background in Sports Science. At the age of 25 he suffered burnout working 70+ hour weeks. It was at this time, he realised that something needed to change. So, started his journey to find a solution to live a better and healthier life for himself.

In the process of getting his health back he set about working on a solution so that others wouldn’t need to go through what he did. From this point on, he was devoted to the pursuit of recognising and developing this ‘Self Care’ revolution.

He wanted to develop a  holistic community dedicated to the preservation of health and wellness worldwide. For everyone, for mother earth and its oceans, mountains, plains and rivers. So this is what he did.

The essence of his philosophy is based on the need that we all need to work on our own self before we start giving and helping others. If our own cup is empty, how can we be the example for others? We all need to fill our own cups until it is overflowing with all the good stuff. Once it is full to the brim then we can allow the  overflow  to spill over to the people we want to help and share our lives with.

Along the way, through  his journey he made a decision to partner with a Health and Wellness company which took him to Indonesia. From here he realised that Bali was a place which nourished his soul and he literally decided to sell up everything to base himself there for the foreseeable future.

Photo by Niklas Weiss on Unsplash

From the Island of the Gods (Bali) he continues to work on his concepts and ideas. For those that want to know more about his selfcare framework, he has a free download  that is available to anyone via his website.

On our podcast He shares with us some of his journey and some of the hurdles he faced to get to this chapter in his life. He is one amazing guy who simply made a decision that this is the life he wanted, and he set about to achieve it.

He advocates that everyone has the ability to create a new and different chapter in their lives. His message to anyone who is questioning where they are in life,  is that if something doesn’t feel right, then you need to stop and take a breath. We all need to stop and think about we want with our own individual circumstances instead of accepting that this is the way it is. It is only then that we can lean towards a more rounded and healthier life.

He does live a lifestyle which many people may be envious off, and he uses the digital world to get his message across. He does, however,  cautions that it may not be for everyone. There is a lot of hard work still to get to this point, and the journey may be a never ending path. We must admit though, we like his version of working 9 to 5 very much.

His path is not the norm, but it is the exception. His dream is not everyone’s dream but he encourages everyone to be courageous, to be brave and to be bold. If anyone wants to know more about how to get involved, check out our blog or message us through any of our channels and we can connect you to him.

Until next time. Live Work Digital

Lisa & Luki

Why Working from Home is Not for You.

Working from home has to be the dream lifestyle right? There is no commute, there is no uniform standards and you set your own breaks. What a life this would be.

In recent times there has been a need to shift the workplace into the home environment. This of course is not by their own choice. Different industries needed this to happen to ensure that not only people were able to be safe whilst doing their jobs, but also to ensure that business was continuing as normal as possible.

Working from home can be a lonely affair at the best of times. Traditionally, people who worked from home were generally small business owners and freelancers. The recent shift has dramatically changed this working landscape.

With the digital technologies now available, the Australian Government had already flagged this potential shift in how people would work in the future with recent studies highlighting this trend. Teleworking occurs when employees are able to perform their duties within the confines of their home environment. An agreement is reached where this occurs.

I will cover this topic more in another post, however this article will be more on my experience as a small business owner where I had a home office setup.

A lifetime ago, I was a Franchisee Bookkeeper with a well known brand. Yes, there will be more to this story also on another post.  I will also explain the reasons why and how as well.

Okay, so I had this home office decked out with 3 workstations, a decent printer and whiteboards. The office furniture was also not the cheap ones you get from Officeworks or Kmart, but they were bought from a business which sold ex-corporate office furniture. We had just moved into a new house that  we had just built so we had in mind that the space which was normally earmarked for a formal living room at the front of the house, was always going to be an office. We just put some double doors on it and it was virtually ready made., It was also right at the entrance of the house as you walked in.

It was perfect. I didn’t have to go anywhere if I chose not to right! I could not be more wrong. The best part of working from home was that I would save money on fuel and time. I am not sure whether timing was an issue but, I had started a new business and started this new adventure with a brood of 3 young kids. At the time, my boys were roughly about 2, 4 and 6 years old. In some ways it was perfect as I was available if needed with the kids at any time. Thank goodness I didn’t have a pet as well as I know that would be just as big a distraction.

Photo by Allie on Unsplash

In other ways, it made my life difficult. My time working in the home was one of the most difficult times in my life. I spiralled into a situation that I could not control. There was no separation between work and home life. It became a major issue in my relationship with my family.

Here are my 10 reasons why Working from home may not be for you:

• It is a lonely life
• Being a small business owner is not easy
• You need to be disciplined with your work day
• If you don’t have structure, you can get distracted with other things
• It is strangely a very tiring experience
• You still need to dress up for work
• Clients come to visit at your home
• There is no one to make you accountable
• You need a good Internet Provider
• Work doesn’t stop at 5pm every day

Here is my experience in a nutshell. I found it difficult to separate the home and life balance. I wanted to work from home because I was close to the family and wanted to be available for my young kids and my wife. What I didn’t realise was that no matter how structured and disciplined I was, I was always drawn to the guilt of not being able to be switched off totally from my work.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Life became a rolling ball of momentum that I was not able to stop. When you take into consideration of the mechanics of starting up a new business, plus the fact that I was learning this bookkeeping caper on the go. Say what?!  Yep you got it. I had never been a bookkeeper in my life. I mean, I flunked out of University the first time because I hated Accounting so much. I did the relevant courses of course, but I was new to the industry and I had the steepest learning curve you could ever have in starting a new business.

Oh yes, I had never used MYOB or any real accounting platform before in my life and I didn’t really know too much about GST and BAS. What was I thinking?

Looking back at the whole experience, it was a pretty stupid thing to do, leaving a perfectly good job to get into something I didn’t like and to something I had no experience in doing.  This is a bigger story than I can cover in this particular blog post, but I am hoping you get my drift.

Working from home needs to have a certain amount of driven responsibility and adaptability. Unless you have both, you will find it difficult to be productive on a day to day basis. Who is going to push you to and who is there to guide you when you have a business question.  Do you have an office space big and airy enough to work in? Do you have a window? Depending on the window, this even maybe a distraction for you.

If you are not careful, the boundaries of home and work life become blurred and you end up alone and working away until all hours of the night.

Photo by Burst from Pexels

One major piece of learning I got from this experience was to ensure that no matter what I did, I would never do something again where my heart wasn’t in it, This didn’t meant I was never going to try different options again, but it meant that I needed to be more measured in what it is I was doing in the future. If I was a painter or an artist and I loved doing it, working from home would be perfect.

10 years later, I am able to give you some reasons why working from home is not for you!

Find what you love!

Cheers,

Luki

Episode 2 – Amanda Stevenson [Optikids Fitness]

For Episode 2, we welcome Amanda Stevenson from Optikids fitness a fitness program designed for kids to be active and have fun. Optikids is a unique program that runs before and after school at the Kororoit Creek Primary School, which is situated in the Outer Western Suburbs of Melbourne.

Amanda’s philosophy is to create an atmosphere of fun for the kids, to build up confidence, teamwork, resilience and friendships. She is a highly motivated mother of 4 kids and personal trainer and wife in partnership with Russell her awesome husband. She is also a marathon runner and general fitness geek.

I have known Amanda for a few years through the local running club so it has been awesome seeing how she has changed and transformed her life to where it is now.  She is driven to help her community and the people around her and has a thirst for helping others. Today we talk about her journey and the changes she needed to make in her business for it to continue to survive. She talks to us about what she had to do to adapt and survive…and  with her devoted family she has raised the bar to go outside her comfort zone and go online.

Armed with Google, a tripod, an old iPhone, some sticky tape and a couple of old noticeboards, she converted parts of the house into her film studio. Her family also became her production team.

The Production Centre

The Technical Equipment

Ready to Film

The Production Crew

Cue Cards

High Tech Equipment

Ready to Film

She attributes a lot of her success to applying some of the things she has learnt from her Business Coach, whom she met in a chance meeting a couple of years ago. Through networking and putting herself out there, Amanda has built a reputation for her love of not only her family but the kids that take part in a program. She does it for the pure love of maintaining and living a healthy lifestyle.

She has had to make a lot of changes and she has had to overcome what many in her industry are now going through. Instead of giving up she found a way to continue to serve her community of families who live her and are appreciative of what she is doing for the community. Instead of waiting for the economy to improve, she evolved and took it head on. She truely is an amazing woman.

As a result, she has transformed her whole business to operate online. There are still many unknowns as to when the current world situation will change, but regardless of what happens, I am sure Amanda and her team will change it up and forge ahead to more success in the future.

From the humble beginnings of the upstairs rumpus room she quickly adapted and transitioned her film studio to the garage. She learnt on the go and her production got better every time she went live on air. It goes to show that you don’t need a lot of money to get things started. Just a team of supporters and the ability to find a way to make it happen.

Fancy New Tech

Looking Pro

Ready to Shoot

Lights, Camera, Action

Thank you very Amanda for your time and for sharing us your story. I hope you all enjoy listening to it.

We will of course keep everyone in the loop with Amanda’s progress in the future. Thank you again Amanda for your enthusiasm and you drive. I know your family would constantly be telling you this, but you should be very proud of what you have achieved so far. Thanks also for being part of our project.

Love to you and all your fans.

Luki & Lisa

How Not to Make a Podcast [Journal #1]

Photo by Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

Don’t Wait until you start a University degree, and more importantly, don’t wait until the time is right. When you decide the time is right and it is something that you want to do, just get it done.

Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels

With the wind in our faces and our tongues hanging out our mouths, like excited puppies on a road trip winding through the Great Ocean Road, we definitely were on our way.  There was no turning back. We now actually have a live Podcast Channel and it is available on Spotify and Apple Podcast amongst other platforms available  everywhere!

We are currently well on the way to our 4th interview (at the time of writing this post) and about to drop our 2nd Episode with the amazing Amanda Stevenson. She is a dynamic personal trainer who runs a fitness program and works with young kids at a  local Primary School.

Part of what we want to achieve is to document our journey to show  how easy it can be done to start something like this. It also doesn’t matter if  we stuff up along the way. The good thing is that, it doesn’t really matter.  Who cares right?

One of the challenges that we initially thought we would have was the fact that we both lived in different States in the country. The other thing was, what the heck were going to talk about, and who would listen to what we had to say. Driving through the day, especially in these times, everyone seemed to be advertising a podcast. It seemed that if anyone was going to launch one, it was now. There are now over 100 Million people around the world who listen to podcasts, and the numbers are growing each year.

Here is a listen to a few reasons why we shouldn’t do a podcast:

• We don’t have the equipment to start one.
• We are both busy working and studying already. We don’t have time.
• It must be expensive to launch something like this.
• What are we going to talk about?
• Where do we start?
• Why would anyone listen to us.
• How do we get listeners?
• How do we get onto Apple Podcast and Spotify?
• How do we find people to interview?

The list can go on and on forever right?

All of the reasons above are all reasons why we are doing this. It is a challenge and it is an exciting new frontier for us. Although the industry seems new, Podcasts have been around over a good decade now.

It is also important to keep in mind that before 8 weeks ago, Lisa and I did not even know each other. In fact , we still haven’t officially met. The reason we have connected is because of the existence of this digitally connected world. The good thing about this for our situation was that because it was a pretty major assignment for us. We had to at least follow through to a working product that could be assessed.

We did our research and we assigned tasks evenly and we just got it done.  There are many podcast platforms out there that we could have used:

• Buzzsprout
• Podbean
• Transistor
• Simulcast
• Captivate
• Spreaker
• Blah
• Blah
• Blah

So the point is that there are a ton load of choices to choose from. Our main points of difference that we were looking for was that we just wanted the platform to be:

• Totally Free
• East to use
• Able to be used with gear we already had
• We could record with multiple people involved
• It could get us onto the main listening platforms
• There were available resources to learn how to podcast
• One that had a track record within the industry
• It had to be the easiest and shiniest platform out there (Kidding…..not really!)

The internet is a weird and wonderful place for everything and anything. The one thing to point out with the platforms above that I have pointed out, was that none were free. When you look for stuff on the internet for a while, you kind of find out what is bullshit and what is not out there. There you go, I said it! Shhhhh. What, some of the stuff on here is rubbish! Crazy right!

All the platforms mentioned above may have some free trial period, and a couple have some very basic functionality that is free, but in my eyes, none of them were useable for what we wanted. We actually started to set up our channel on one platform, but it wasn’t very useable or editable from a hosting point of view. There were a handful of templates we could use, but we couldn’t edit most of it. We wanted to create something that was our brand.

The interesting thing I realised on my search for a hosting platform  was that many of the major blogs that spruiked these lists of platforms, were most likely earning affiliate commissions on the links that were on these lists. Therefore, this is why these platforms are all not totally free. They are being pushed to make money for the blogs for people who sign up from their personalised links. (Of course this is what we want to eventually do though right?)

Enter Anchor.fm. We actually set up our details on another platform before I found this one. At the end of the day, this hosting platforms did everything we wanted it to do. I only found it by accident whilst doing some research on another subject I was studying. I found this article on Anchor.fm by one of their founders on Medium, a writing and ideas platform. (More on this later, because this company is mind-blowing).

Side Note – Check out Medium for articles on EVERYTHING! If you are going to search for ideas on where to start or just want some inspiration, do yourself a favour and cruise through their pages.

In a very short amount of time, we just got things going and started. We didn’t use fancy equipment microphones or sound studio. And not long after, we were recording away.

Photo by Jaz King on Unsplash

There you have the beginnings of how we got started on our podcast journey. We still have no idea what we are doing most of the time, but we are having fun doing this.

More on our journey soon. Oh yes, you also don’t need to start a blog. It’s just something we are doing as we can share the love with building this project together. I am also just enjoying writing content at the moment, which is weird for me. Slowly, I am learning and finding my groove. This is one message that I want to continue to put across,

Just find what you love and keep searching for it. Never stop learning and exploring.

Love you all

Luki & Lisa